Tuesday, November 11, 2014

I just said this to a friend, but I think it's worth sharing generally: it's my philosophy about book awards. I believe that first-time academic authors need to make sure their books are nominated for as many awards as possible. The reason is that the point of a nomination is not just to win. Too many people think that if you win, you win, and if you don't win, you lose. That's completely wrong. Whether you win or not, a nomination creates an opportunity for a whole range of positive effects: your book is guaranteed to be read by at least two or three scholars in your general field, and regardless of whether it wins, those people could assign it in their courses, review it, recommend it to students and colleagues, cite it, remember it when you apply for a job... the list of positive possibilities just goes on and on. Prize nominations are a key way to jump-start a reading community for your book. And on top of all that, you could win!

Sometimes people don't nominate their books for awards because they don't think their books could win. This negative self-assessment often entwines with the politics of gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of identity. But my perspective is that winning is beside the point--so the question of whether you have a "chance" of winning is irrelevant. If your book is good enough to get published, it's good enough to be read--and that is exactly what will happen when you nominate it for a prize.

I do understand that nominations can be costly, but I believe it's worth the expense for both publishers and authors. Nominations for many awards for 2014 books are now open... so get your book out there!

Sunday, August 31, 2014

On August 24, John Eligon wrote in the New York Times that Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old gunned down by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was "no angel." The full paragraph read:

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

Appropriately, this slur received widespread criticism and caused many readers to cancel their subscriptions to the Times. The police's claim that Brown was a suspect in the robbery at the time of the shooting has now been discredited, and the Times' implication that a teenager deserved to die because he lived in a "rough" neighborhood and engaged in typical teenage behaviors such as rapping, scuffling with one neighbor, and dabbling with drugs and alcohol is the deepest of insults to African American worth. It suggests, as many have pointed out, that black lives don't matter.

Soon after the Times article appeared, Vanity Fair published Kia Makarechi's important analysis of the Times's use of the phrase "no angel." In this article, Makarechi showed a pattern in which the Times used this term to refer to white people who were the most heinous of criminals and black people who were innocent victims of crimes, entertainers, or criminal suspects. Specifically, Makarechi showed that

A sample of the white folks the Times has called “no angel” includes infamous mobsters, murderers, a pornographer, and a Nazi. Black Americans described similarly by the paper include a basketball player, a singer, criminal suspects, and unarmed men killed by white people.

Sullivan's and Eligon's wishy-washy half-apologies are not just inadequate: by treating the use of the phrase as an isolated incident, Sullivan and Eligon ignore the long history of white assertions that black children cannot be angels. The history that the Vanity Fair article exposed is just the tip of the iceberg.

Shortly before the Civil War, many white writers--especially abolitionists--began anxiously debating whether black children who died could become angels, and if so, whether they needed to become white first. As I write in my book, Racial Innocence, the 1862 abolitionist story "Poor Little Violet," by Lynde Palmer, included a very disturbing scene in which Violet, an enslaved girl, discusses death and angelhood with a white slaveholding girl named Carrie. Violet asks,

“[W]hen we goes to Canaan, that old Sambo sings about, may I be your little slave then, Miss Carrie, ’cause you’s allus so kind?”

“I don’t think there will be any slaves there,” said Carrie, slowly, pondering over the matter.

“Why, what will the black people do, then?” cried Violet, with curious round eyes.

“Maybe,” replied Carrie hesitatingly, “maybe there won’t be any black people—you know, Violet, our bodies are covered up in the ground,”—Violet shivered,—“but our souls go to heaven, and they must all be white.”

“All of ’em?” asked Violet, eagerly.

“Yes, mamma told me that no soul can go till it is washed white in Jesus’ blood.”

The Times's reference to Michael Brown as "no angel" is so deeply hurtful because it extends a historical libel that African Americans, and African American children in particular, cannot be innocent. As the slaveholder Carrie tells Violet, to be an angel is to be white. And in this white-authored text--which was intended to critique slavery--a black girl joyously receives this information with hope that she can shed her blackness, become white, and become an angel.

What is at stake in the phrase "no angel" is the racial distribution of innocence. By calling Michael Brown "no angel," the Times excluded an African American teenager from the realm of innocence. And by doing so, the newspaper of record reserved that assumption of innocence for the white policeman who killed him.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

I'm giving the Second Annual Childhood Studies Lecture at Rutgers-Camden on Thursday, September 19. The talk is hosted by the Department of Childhood Studies, the first department in the US to offer a PhD in childhood studies. I'm looking forward to engaging with the wonderful students and faculty in this ground-breaking department.

“Through an amazing curation of materials carefully and painstakingly gleaned from a number of archives, including collections at the American Antiquarian Society and the Harvard Theatre Collection, Robin Bernstein shows how the innocence of white childhood was imagined and enacted in relation to fictional versions of the black child, rendered in advertisements, collectibles, children’s books and toys, and especially dolls, from the antebellum era into the 1910s. . . . Bernstein’s book is an excellent study of material culture, carefully reading the politics of the manufacture of these toys in their historical context. For instance, Bernstein explains how soft dolls were developed not only for cuddling but to withstand abuse, which she argues is profoundly racialized and gendered. Many dolls in Bernstein’s study accompany storybooks, such as the Golliwog dolls, based on characters invented by Florence Upton, and Raggedy Ann dolls, which John Gruelle designed to accompany his children’s books. Bernstein explains how these dolls have deep roots in minstrelsy. Bernstein’s elucidation of the cruelty involved in the creation of toys and the narratives of storybooks, that supposedly represent the innocence of childhood, is arresting. But it is how white children played with the dolls I find most disturbing in the book. . . . I had a strong response to these assaulting, violent images. The sheer number of the book’s examples began to accumulate on my back, and behind my eyes, as I read. A few of these toxic images went a long way in my case, and I found myself yearning for some kind of black [']answer back,' as my students call it, to counteract the symbolic torture and immolation of black children. But perhaps the very repetition of such images, things, and acts underlines a crucial utility of the book, as it shows how the hegemonic project of white supremacy takes constant reinforcement in popular forms to naturalize racist practices on the ground. Black resistance is the absent presence that threatens such naturalization. The last chapter opens with the ‘answer back’ I needed. She relates the childhood recollections of Daisy Turner, who as a little girl actively resisted a teacher’s scripted racism. The teacher planned a school pageant, in which every child was to represent a different country while holding a doll, dressed in the same clothes, which was meant to represent that nation. Each child was given a poem to read. Daisy Turner was given a black doll named Dinah, representing ‘the nation’ of Africa, and a matching poem. Daisy Turner refused to read the script given her by her teacher, and improvised her own recitation.” Jayna Brown, Callaloo 36.2 (Spring 2013): pp. 482-485.

When I was writing Racial Innocence, I was deeply conflicted about the violence I was representing. I worried that in describing violence against black dolls, I was replicating it and re-inflicting damage. At the same time, I needed to describe the violence in a way that took seriously the acts of white children and that held them accountable. A key point of my book is that the actions and material culture of white children have, over the past hundred and fifty years, been made to appear innocent. But they are not innocent. White children's violence against black dolls is real violence; it is not just "child's play." I wanted my book to rip the veil off of a century and a half of racial innocence, and to do so I had to expose violence. I tried to describe it in a simple, straightforward way that avoided, equally, sensationalism and trivialization. And I know that these descriptions have caused pain, as Jayna Brown describes.

I'm grateful that Brown recognizes the heart of my goal: I aimed to show "how the hegemonic project of white supremacy takes constant reinforcement in popular forms to naturalize racist practices on the ground." This is exactly what I wanted my book to demonstrate: the ongoing, always-forming-and-reforming historical relationship between the micro and the macro, between the seemingly innocent acts of individual children and the broadest structures of white supremacy. As Brown notes, white supremacy requires "constant reinforcement" to to continue to exist. In other words, white supremacy is fundamentally a lie, and the only way it can maintain any credibility at all is if it is constantly re-enacted "on the ground," as Brown puts it.

Brown's review prompted me to recall a passage from the Introduction to my dissertation:

As I wrote this dissertation, I frequently envisioned a machine capable of reversing gravity. I imagined a machine that could contain a space such as a room or a house and invert it, yet enable all objects within that space to function normally so that the people within the house could not sense that they were in fact upside-down. I imagined, in other words, a machine capable of convincing people that up was down and down was up. How much human genius would be necessary to invent a machine that could obscure the fundamental truth of gravity? How large would such a machine need to be? How much energy would it use? How much would it cost? How much constant effort, and from how many different populations, would be required to maintain this machine? What chaos would ensue if—or inevitably, when—a fly in the gears caused the machine to pause, even for a nanosecond, in its labor? And how would the upside-down people within the machine manage these intermittent episodes of chaos?

This imagined gravity-reversal machine provides the metaphor by which I understand white supremacy. White supremacist ideology was and is a tremendous, energy-gobbling machine that aims to convince all people within its influence of a fundamental falsehood: that people of color are essentially inferior to white people; that some of us are more and some of us are less human than others. Evidence against white people’s inherent superiority is and always has been abundantly available. . . . I wrote this dissertation because I wanted to understand machinery that could convince large numbers of people that a falsehood was true, that up was down and down was up, that some people are more human than others. I wanted to understand machinery that could manage abundant and assertive evidence—of gravity, of humanity—in such a way that that evidence did not shatter the illusions that the machine existed to construct. Childhood is one crucial gear—a “linchpin,” in Caroline Levander’s language—within the giant cultural machine of white supremacist ideology. This dissertation traces the teeth of that gear and shows how it performs within the cultural machinery of white supremacy.

May we all, like Daisy Turner, "answer back," throw down the props of white supremacy, and interrupt the constant, repeated acts--often banal, everyday behaviors that appear too minor to matter--that white supremacy depends on for its continuing, malignant existence.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

The current issue of Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures includes Jenny Wills' terrific 13-page review--which toward the end bursts into a hybrid review/article in which Wills discusses contemporary subjects such as Barbie and Bratz dolls. Here are some highlights:

"Racial Innocence is a provocative, insightful, and bold text that demonstrates how important the field of cultural studies is and can be. Texts and topics are interwoven with poignant commentaries about race and identity in a way that insists that Bernstein's aruments are equally relevant to scholars interested in youth narratives and cultures as well as those of us working in critical race studies. . . . In Racial Innocence, however, we get more than a historically grounded cultural reading of print and non-print texts. We get a framework through which we might think through a variety of objects in terms of their implications on childhood, race, and innocence. Most importantly, Bernstein reminds us that sentimental, picturesque, and childhood playthings are not benign or devoid of serious racialized implications. This critical book goes beyond the specific texts that its author addresses, although Bernstein does move between subjects with finesse and expertise; Racial Innocence casts a much-needed spotlight onto so many of the artifacts from our daily environments." Jenny Wills, "Scripted Violence, Scripted Deferral: Pre- and Post-Civil Rights Racial Innocence," Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 5.1 (2013): 179-191.

I saw hundreds of dolls at the Shelburne Museum, but the ones that really stay with me are these two:

These are very special, rare, beautiful dolls. To explain what makes them so interesting, I have to provide some background on dolls and race.

Dolls are political--not only in how they look, but also in how they feel, and how their materiality invites different kinds of play. In Racial Innocence, I wrote a lot about soft dolls that were designed to accommodate children's rough play. In the U.S. in the nineteenth century, a few small cottage industries began manufacturing such dolls. Small-scale makers of soft commercial dolls included Izannah Walker, Martha Jenks Chase, and Julia Jones Beecher, half-sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe. These white women all lived and worked in the postbellum North, but each manufactured at least one Plantation-style black doll. The Shelburne Museum owns, for example, this "mammy" doll manufactured by Martha Jenks Chase sometime between 1890 and 1900:

As I showed in my book, white nineteenth-century American children routinely subjected soft black dolls to enormous violence, and this violence was not only tolerated but encouraged by white adults who viewed such acts as racially innocent.

But there's another part of the story. Until the Civil Rights Movement, most commercial black dolls in the United States were caricatured and grotesque--but in Germany and France, a whole other vision of black people flourished. As Myla Perkins demonstrates in her two-volume masterpiece, Black Dolls: An Identification and Value Guide, nineteenth-century dollmakers in France and Germany produced black dolls with the same molds they used to produce white dolls. The resulting black dolls were beautiful and non-caricatured. Unfortunately, because they were expensive imports, few African American children had access to them. In the U.S., most owners of these dolls were wealthy white girls.

Which brings us back to the white, wealthy Electra Havemeyer Webb, who added these beautiful dolls to her museum collection in 1951. These dolls are made of papier-mâché, and the Shelburne Museum identifies them as German, most likely produced in the 1850s (they were about a century old, then, when the museum acquired them). Unlike other German dolls which were produced with molds that were also used for white dolls, these dolls' faces and hair seem designed to represent the features of people of African descent.

The woman wears fine clothes and a bonnet, with detailing in the trim and buttons. While it is possible that the doll was intended to represent a servant, she does not present only that image (unlike the Martha Jenks Chase "mammy" doll and so many others like it). Her face is finely-drawn, realistic, and lovely. There is no hint of mockery.

The man is more ambiguous. He could represent a gentleman, or he could represent a servant in livery. Despite this ambiguity, this doll projects dignity. His clothing is, like the female doll's, carefully detailed in rich cloth. And the face beautifully represents African-diasporic features. In both cases, the large eyes and full cheeks reflect the period's conventions in doll-faces more than those of racist caricature.

How did these fragile dolls survive a century in which the abuse of black dolls was the norm? Were they owned by black children? Did they survive because they were loved and treated tenderly? Did they survive because they were unloved and ignored? As with most dolls, it is difficult or even impossible to determine precisely what relationship they had with individual children and adults in the past. But we can imagine. And we can pause to look these dolls in the face and to remember: no matter how deeply the nineteenth century was steeped in racist imagery, counter-images existed. "Mammy" and other caricatures dominated black dolls prior to the Civil Rights Movement. And because they were so dominant, so denigrating, and so damaging, it is easy to forget that other kinds of dolls existed. But they did exist--and when we see them in places like the Shelburne Museum, we should pause, pay attention, and really take in the beauty before us.

Racial Innocence

SYNOPSIS OF RACIAL INNOCENCE

In Racial Innocence, Robin Bernstein argues that the concept of "childhood innocence" has been central to U.S. racial formation since the mid-nineteenth century. Children--white ones imbued with innocence, black ones excluded from it, and others of color erased by it--figured pivotally in sharply divergent racial agendas from slavery and abolition to antiblack violence and the early civil rights movement.

Bernstein takes up a rich archive including books, toys, theatrical props, and domestic knickknacks which she analyzes as "scriptive things" that invite or prompt historically-located practices while allowing for resistance and social improvisation. Integrating performance studies with literary and visual analysis, Bernstein offers singular readings of theatrical productions from blackface minstrelsy to Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; literary works by Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Wilson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett; material culture including Topsy pincushions, Uncle Tom and Little Eva handkerchiefs, and Raggedy Ann dolls; and visual texts ranging from fine portraiture to advertisements for lard substitute. Throughout, Bernstein shows how "innocence" gradually became the exclusive province of white children--until the Civil Rights Movement succeeded not only in legally desegregating public spaces, but in culturally desegregating the concept of childhood itself.

PRAISE FOR RACIAL INNOCENCE

"One of those rare books that shifts the paradigm—a book that, in years to come, will be recognized as a landmark in children’s literature and childhood studies. . . . [F]ew scholars can write a sentence like Bernstein can: packed with insight, theoretically sophisticated, and yet lucid—even, at times, lyrical.”Philip Nel, Children’s Literature

"Nineteenth and early twentieth-century material culture comes alive in Robin Bernstein's brilliant study of the racialized and gendered ideologies that shape, inform and continue to haunt notions of American childhood into the present day. Through imaginative and masterfully innovative archival research, Bernstein shows how representations of childhood and child's play are integral to the making of whiteness and blackness and citizenship in this country. Racial Innocence is a groundbreaking book that for the first time illuminates the powerful and critical connections between constructions of girlhood, racial formations and American popular culture." Daphne Brooks, Princeton University

"I know of virtually no one of her generation who writes with this kind of verve, authority and pleasure." Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Amherst College

About Me

I am a Professor of African and African American Studies and of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. A cultural historian who specializes in US performance and theatre from the 19th century to the present, my interests include formations of race, age, gender, and sexuality, and my research integrates the study of theatrical, visual, material, and literary evidence. In addition to Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, my books include the edited anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (U. Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children’s book titled Terrible, Terrible! (Kar-Ben Books). I have published articles in PMLA, Social Text, African American Review, J19, Modern Drama, and other journals. My current book project, Paradoxy: Lesbians and the Everyday Art of the Impossible, shows how racially diverse lesbians in the U.S. have, since the early twentieth century, performed paradoxes on stage and in everyday life. These bodily performances of paradoxes, I argue, have theorized lesbian modes of historiography, art-making, and politics. Visit me at http://scholar.harvard.edu/robinbernstein/home.